Most reshares: 4

Changing my gender to male on Google+ improved my What's Hot experience Google+ has updated how they distribute content to users through Explore

Earlier today, +Kimberly Chapman told me about a little experiment she'd done. She'd opened a tab on her browser and directed it to plus.google.com/explore, a stream that enables you to see the hottest content on Google+. In another tab, Chapman changed her gender on her Google+ profile from female to male, and then loaded the Explore page into another tab.

The difference was astonishing. "As a girl, I get stupid warm-fuzzy meaningless shit," Chapman writes on a post (http://goo.gl/ZDBxT). "As a guy, I get nerdy stuff. This is not okay. I get that [What's Hot] algorithms are based on what people click, like, share, comment on, etc. Fine. But I challenge anyone to give me one good reason why there ... more »

I sincerely hope fixing this beast was worth it. I didn't realize the problem was actually in the &^%#@$ BACK of it by the motor controller. I kept thinking it was in the front column! Arrrrrgh. You are a superhero.﻿

I sincerely hope fixing this beast was worth it. I didn't realize the problem was actually in the &^%#@$ BACK of it by the motor controller. I kept thinking it was in the front column! Arrrrrgh. You are a superhero.﻿___

For the last five years, Noisebridge, one of the oldest hackerspaces in the country, has been run as a consensus-based anarchist collective that had just one rule: "Be excellent to one another." It's consensus-driven political process means that any major changes to the space that go beyond its typical "doocracy" have to be put up for consensus, a system in which a single member's refusal to agree can shut down an otherwise popular request. The consensus process is one that is not conducive to much in the way of governance, though this is of course generally viewed as more of a feature than a bug; it ensures that the space remain true to its anarchist roots.

Recently, this has become more and more problematic, as attempts to remove sexual predators from the space have been stymied by the presence of lone, oblivious members of the community who simply refuse to believe that someone they consider a friend might not be a friend to women in the space. The situation at Noisebridge has gotten so bad (alongside other issues such as dirtiness and homeless people living in the space) that long-time members went so far as to put in a proposal that Noisebridge seek to terminate its lease[1], presumably to then rebirth itself at a new location with tighter access control. Although it was clear that this proposal would never pass consensus, the decision was made that we would discuss the reasons why it was proposed, in the hopes of fixing the underlying issues in the future. By sheer luck, the meeting had been scheduled shortly after a feminist hacking event sponsored by Double-Union, a local feminist hackerspace, and as a result a large contingent of woman hackers was present. Stories pretty quickly came out about why so many were willing to let the space die.

I've been spending time at Noisebridge for the last year, and in that time, I've been harassed by multiple people on many different occasions, almost always with members present. Never once has a member intervened or spoken up on my behalf: not when Weev called me a cunt or made anti-semitic, anti-mormon, anti-woman, anti-gay jokes loudly in the space, not when someone loudly (and descriptively) told me about the "sluts" they double-penetrated the night before, not when an individual (upon seeing me about to leave the space on my Powerisers) declared "I love your stilts. I'm going to make you my bride and then those will be mine" before slapping my ass as I was leaving just a few weeks ago. The closest thing I have felt to supported in the space was when one individual decided to doocratically paint over the bathroom wall, which at the time was covered in images of maimed and broken crying women with enormous tits and waists so thin they would make Barbie jealous. It has become abundantly clear to most women in the space that "Be Excellent" has failed us.

Any other night, the telling of these stories would simply have been an explanation of why we were willing to let go of Noisebridge, why we were ready to withdraw from the community, but that night we had just come from a room full of interesting, engaging, awesome feminist hackers, and I had sitting in my email a very clear anti-harassment policy that had been created by the good folks at the +Ada Initiative and the ladies of Double Union. Once the dust had settled, we made a proposal: to adopt an anti-harassment policy, post it visibly in the space, and empower members to remove the toxic elements from the community, without having to go through the consensus process to do so. The policy we proposed is as follows:

Noisebridge is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of people at our events or space in any form. Sexual language and imagery should be only be used for positive purposes in accordance with best practices advocated by professional sex educators (if you’re not sure what those are, don’t do it). People violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the space or the event at the discretion of any Noisebridge member.

The key strength of the policy is that it allows a member to kick someone out, without requiring consensus to do so. This prevents the situation we've sadly been dealing with in which individuals regularly block attempts to remove predators from the space, but brought some concerns about evidence and the possibility of innocent people being excluded. The policy did pass (provisionally), but not without objection. The arguments against it were the standard ones: free speech, false accusations, and straight-up denial of there being a problem at all. A few people expressed concerns about the possibility of the policy being used in retaliatory ways (the old "false-rape accusations" argument), including Monad, the lone member who threatened to block. He, of course is responsible for perhaps the best quote of the night: "The first sentence is fine.....the rest of it is just stupid to me."

Monad was demonstrating exactly the problem Noisebridge has had for years. He was fine with the idea of there being a policy, with saying "Noisebridge is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience," but he balked at the idea of defining what harassment was or creating any system by which it could be dealt with. In short, he wanted to simply be able to say "be excellent" and have it happen, but wasn't willing to accept that for some things, specifics are needed.

Some arguments, especially those that erupted on twitter after Leif Ryge, a Noisebridge member, tweeted his displeasure about the policy [2], centered on the idea that it was tantamount to censorship, banning "sexual imagery and language." Of course, Leif's tweet was misleading, as the policy doesn't ban sexual language & imagery entirely, just mandates that "Sexual language and imagery should be only be used for positive purposes." It's a far cry from the "censorship" that some people are claiming this represents.

In the end, we weren't able to convince Monad from backing down on his threat to block, a position he justified by claiming that the policy might be used alongside false accusations as a way of removing people you don't like from the space, so we settled on a compromise: to pass the measure with an expiration date, so that we could have a few months to tweak the language, perfect it and smooth out any issues, and see whether or not any of these "false accusations" that are so often the favorite arguments of rape apologists actually occurred. To those of you that believe that the policy is needed, but needs some tweaking, I hope that you will use the time between now and January to iron out the details and come back with an even better policy: one that makes it clear that harassment is not acceptable behavior in the space, that still has teeth, and that can draw clear lines and boundaries that ensure that unwanted sexual attention is unacceptable while perhaps approaching the issue from a slightly more sex-positive standpoint.

I'm standing up against verbal abuse on LKML. I will happily stand alone, however you can also support this cause. Please speak up, either here on Google+ by resharing this post, or commenting on this post with words of support. If you dare, you can also reply to my lkml email.

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137390362508794&w=2

"Where do I put this fire? This bright red feeling? This Tiger Lily down my mouth? He wants to grow to 20 feet tall... I'm so tired of being shy; I'm not that girl any more. I'm not that straight-A anymore."

Changing my gender to male on Google+ improved my What's Hot experience Google+ has updated how they distribute content to users through Explore

Earlier today, +Kimberly Chapman told me about a little experiment she'd done. She'd opened a tab on her browser and directed it to plus.google.com/explore, a stream that enables you to see the hottest content on Google+. In another tab, Chapman changed her gender on her Google+ profile from female to male, and then loaded the Explore page into another tab.

The difference was astonishing. "As a girl, I get stupid warm-fuzzy meaningless shit," Chapman writes on a post (http://goo.gl/ZDBxT). "As a guy, I get nerdy stuff. This is not okay. I get that [What's Hot] algorithms are based on what people click, like, share, comment on, etc. Fine. But I challenge anyone to give me one good reason why there should be such a drastic difference in less than ten seconds by simply changing my gender, other than institutionalized sexism about what girls and guys apparently like."

I tried the experiment myself just a moment ago. Below are ten posts that graced my screen, organized into pairs. I have paired them based on their placement on my stream and no other factors. The example image shown below, for instance, shows a post with a quote and one with a bar graph -- the quote was the fifth post on my Explore stream when I was female and the bar graph was the fifth post on my Explore stream when I was male.

Note that I have not changed anything other than my profile. And despite my extensive interaction with the social network, when I'm female, gadgets might as well not exist. When I was male, I saw two posts referencing #io13 , but there was no mention of the event when I was female. In fact, the closest thing to tech news I got as a female was an article about how to become an influencer on Pinterest. Needless to say, this article didn't show up when I was male.

Neither did the nausea-inducing feel-good quotes on pictures.

+Yonatan Zunger, Chief Architect of Google+, responded to the issue, saying: "What's Hot is based both on properties inherent to the post -- how people have reacted to it when they saw it, +1's, reshares, and so on -- and on properties of the viewer, especially profile info. Gender is one of those signals, as are quite a few other things. From what I can tell, gender is having a relatively large effect on the result set, because our models (based on people's actual responses to seeing these things) seem to show a pretty sharp gender difference in response."

He agreed the model is too gender sensitive, adding that a team is currently working on content recommendations that better reflect individual user preferences. He assures users that "there was no human editing to say that women like X and men like Y."

UPDATE: At 13:08 Pacific, Zunger commented on this post saying that further discussion with the What's Hot team has revealed that the system that populates Explore is using an old-generation algorithm, which is known to have been very gender sensitive.

"The system that populates the actual What's Hot posts you see in your [Home] stream is the more modernized system, with a lot more subtlety in its model, and it does not have the same level of gender sensitivity," Zunger added. "It's still aware of it, but it's a small feature, not a big one."

Google+ plans to upgrade Explore to the new algorithm. Thank you, Google+ team for being responsive about this issue. We look forward to seeing how this algorithm continues to evolve to serve us more and more of the content each of us wants.﻿___Giant eyeroll. Way to reify...

Anita Borg Institute awards for this year are open -- take a look and nominate early, nominate often!

ABI awards are now open!

Among them, for example: * The Award for Social Impact recognizes individuals who have made a positive impact on women, technology, and society. Recipients are honored by the technical women’s community at the Grace Hopper Celebration. The award includes a prize of $10,000.

* The A. Richard Newton Educator Award recognizes educators for developing innovative teaching practices and approaches that attract girls and women to computing, engineering, and math. Recipients are honored by the technical women’s community at the Grace Hopper Celebration. The award includes a prize of $5,000.

If you know someone who is making impressive strides in helping women and girls make a positive impact... take a look. (And share this, since anyone can apply worldwide.)﻿___Anita Borg Institute awards for this year are open -- take a look and nominate early, nominate often!

+Linus Torvalds you have a terrible temper and you treat people really badly.

You don't have to face the consequences of your actions because of your position of power. That makes your behaviour doubly reprehensible.

You are a bully. You need to get help.

+The Linux Foundation You need to take responsibility for the behaviour of your fellows on public mailing lists. You need to establish some guidelines for fellows, and you need to stick with them, regardless of who breaks them.

+IBM +Fujitsu +HP Intel NEC Oracle +Qualcomm +Samsung USA and other Linux Foundation members need to decide if they want to have their brands associated with bullying behaviour and homophobic slurs.

And the rest of of have to start saying that this kind of behaviour isn't OK.﻿___Right on.

I bought a digital video download today that required a video player from Leaping Brain. As usual, the proprietary player wasn't great and to transfer it to my iPhone I'd need another proprietary player. Ugh. But I browsed around and found that the video had been downloaded into a hidden directory as a bunch of .mov files. Great, except none of the files would play.

It turned out the actual player, launched from their compiled app, was a Python wrapper around some VLC libraries. Nothing funny going on, as far as I could tell, but when I tried to launch the player directly, nothing happened. The compiled app was modifying the .mov files right before they were loaded into the player, and then reverting the file on disk. According to http://leapingbrain.com/mod-machine/faq/:

"We apply our BrainTrust™ proprietary video encryption to your movies before we upload them to our servers. If someone ever was able to gain access to your content, the files would be useless and unplayable, because they are stored in a scrambled, encrypted format. Once downloaded to the user’s hard drive, the files are still encrypted and only readable via the MOD Machine Player by a legitimate owner. We are not aware of a better DRM scheme than ours. Where Windows Media DRM is easily crackable, and doesn’t run on Macs, BrainTrust™ works great on Windows 8, Vista, Windows XP and Mac, and is virtually uncrackable."

Virtually uncrackable? Well, since they load the file from a Python script, it's easy to make a copy of the "decrypted" file before it's reverted. Having done so, I was curious to see the encryption scheme. By comparing the binary files, I discovered the "proprietary video encryption" algorithm: for the first 15kB, each 1kB block has its initial bytes xor'd with the string "RANDOM_STRING". That's the "scrambled, encrypted format" that leaves these files "useless and unplayable".﻿___Awesome.

Awesome fundraising effort - still needs more help! And there is a doctor who has agreed to do the surgery for free on Ken Starks. I hope it goes well. I admire his work fixing up and giving computers to kids in Austin.

+Ken Starks is a Linux and open-source supporter. He also runs a non-profit that's donated thousands of PCs to low-income households. Now, he needs help to fight cancer. For more on what's happening with him see:

http://thomasaknight.com/blog.php?id=71

Please consider giving. Thanks.﻿___Awesome fundraising effort - still needs more help! And there is a doctor who has agreed to do the surgery for free on Ken Starks. I hope it goes well. I admire his work fixing up and giving computers to kids in Austin.

A heroic teenager, http://abcnews.go.com/US/dark-knight-rises-shooting-victim-stopped-young-mom/story?id=16822336#.UAsS-XAbZe4 and some food for thought : http://cgdageek.tumblr.com/post/27712633396/according-to-a-study-cited-by-abcs-20-20-black-people﻿

A heroic teenager, http://abcnews.go.com/US/dark-knight-rises-shooting-victim-stopped-young-mom/story?id=16822336#.UAsS-XAbZe4 and some food for thought : http://cgdageek.tumblr.com/post/27712633396/according-to-a-study-cited-by-abcs-20-20-black-people﻿___